The Democracy Video Player, a free player for online videos, has been re-branded and re-launched as “Miro” by its developers, the not-for-profit Participatory Culture Foundation.

The new Miro player is more polished and more stable than ever, according to Nicholas Reville, Executive Director of PCF. The restructured channel guide makes finding videos easy, and the addition of Veoh.com as one of the inbuilt video search engines opens up even more available content.

Miro currently has 1571 channels, many of which are in high definition. Similar to RSS news aggregators, the software can subscribe to channels and automatically download new content for you. Videos from YouTube can also be downloaded and saved.

The Democracy Player, essentially an RSS video feed aggregator with a slick interface, is busy adding available channels, including a lot of high definition content. The player facilitates subscribing to channels, or feeds, and automatically downloads videos to your computer.

A new feature added to this release is the ability to sort by high definition channels only. The player also indicates which channels, or feeds, are available in high definition.

Most LCD monitors are equivalent to high definition TVs in terms of resolution. I watch online videos on my Dell 24″ widescreen monitor. Watching low resolution video fullscreen is painful.

Having a feed aggregator like the Democracy Player indicate which channels are high definition is a nice feature that should appeal to lots of people. As web video matures, it will be interesting to see if software like Joost transition totally to high definition.

The Democracy Player is one of the few online video players that is open source (hence the name “Democracy”).

Michael Pick recently wrote an in-depth review of The News Room concentrating on how you can use its news video feeds to make money on your website. Taking a closer look I found a few faults with The News Room’s payment structure.

1. As you can see in the picture above it says that you can earn $4 CPM rate for video feeds. CPM basically means “cost per 1000 impressions”. But does it mean that 1000 impressions of the video feed box (shown below) will earn you $4 or every 1000 views of an actual video, i.e users have to play a video for it to count towards the 1000 impressions.
2. The News Room does not allow you to track your earnings. So at no point can you actually see how much you have earned. This is very frustrating for anyone expecting to earn money from The News Room.

Continue Reading…

We got wind of an unconfirmed rumor last week that CBS was going to acquire the stock market video blog WallStrip. It has now been confirmed on the WallStrip Blog.

“Yep, CBS has made the absolute genius decision to burn through a piece of their $1.8 billion in Cash Flow to buy/own Wallstrip,” said Howard Lindzon, the founder of WallStrip.

The final value of the deal has not been disclosed although it has been said that it was not the $5 million we originally thought it was.

[Via Howard Lindzon’s WallStrip Blog]

Everybody but nobody wants to get their filthy hands on a beta copy of Joost, well at least anyone who can use a computer and likes a bit of free TV.

For those of you that don’t know, Joost is a new internet TV application from the makers of Skype and Kazaa, you can see a full review of Joost with screenshots here.

I promised you about a week ago some Joost invites. Your chance has now arrived to get a sneak peek at the P2P program that is being tipped to revolutionize the TV industry.

I’m giving away 20 Joost invites to anyone who is willing to take part in this quick competition:

The Joost invite competition:

1. You must leave a comment to this post and state a SINGLE website that is EITHER a:
1. Video search engine
   A video search indexes videos from multiple websites and uses textual information — and sometimes the speech within a video — to assign meta data to that video. Videos can be searched for by keyword and results can often be filtered by a variety of criteria such as length, quality etc. An example is searchforvideo.com.
   Video sharing websites like YouTube or DailyMotion will not be accepted.
2. Community driven video aggregator
   A community driven video aggregator is a website where the community submits videos to the website from all over the web. The rest of the community then votes for the videos and the best videos get more exposure. An example is digg.com/videos.
   Video sharing websites like YouTube or DailyMotion will not be accepted.
3. Video Blog Subscriber and Player
   This is usually a piece of software that allows you to subscribe to any video blog that has an RSS feed. It will automatically download the latest video and organize it into your own video library. Then you can just watch the latest episodes from your favorite video blogs or internet TV episodes when you want to. An example is Instant Media.
   Regular RSS readers that download enclosures will not be accepted.
2. You must state the URL of the website and whether it is a video search engine, a community driven video aggregator, or a video blog subscriber.
3. If someone has already posted that website correctly then you won’t be entered into the competition, so the earlier you leave your comment the easier it will be!
4. The competition will close at midnight (EST) on Sunday 4th March and I’ll select 20 winners at random and email them a Joost invite.
5. Only one entry per person.

Click here to leave your comment and enter the competition.